The Adventures of Ellery Queen: Problems in Deduction

New York: Grosset & Dunlap / Madison Square Books. Very Good in Very Good dj. [1940] (c.1934). Reprint. Hardcover. [a good sound copy, tiny fraying and very slight exposure of boards at lower tips but no other significant wear, bookplate on front pastedown, one-time owner's name plus date & place of purchase and brief comment (all in ink) at top of front endpaper, small ink check-mark next to each title in the table of contents; the jacket has some wear along the top and bottom edges, with shallow chipping along top edge (mostly at top of spine), light scuffing/soiling, one small closed tear and associated short crease at bottom right corner of front panel]. The first "Ellery Queen" book that wasn't a novel, originally published by Frederick A. Stokes in 1934. The contents, "a veritable banquet of thrills for all lovers of Problems in Deduction" (a reference to the subtitle on all of EQ's early mystery novels), were stories that had appeared in various magazines (some under different titles than here) during 1933 and 1934. The tales, all of which had "The Adventure of" prepended to their titles for purposes of this collection (probably a conscious nod to the original Sherlock Holmes stories, which employed the same titling practice), are: "The African Traveler"; "The Hanging Acrobat"; "The One-Penny Black"; "The Bearded Lady"; "The Three Lame Men"; "The Invisible Lover"; "The Teakwood Case"; "'The Two-Headed Dog'"; "The Glass-Domed Clock"; "The Seven Black Cats"; and "The Mad Tea-Party." A feature carried over from a number of the early novels was the book's Preface by the mysterious "J.J. McC.," a friend of the Queens, who here relates conversations he had with both Ellery and his father Richard, on the topic of his being asked to write this very foreword! It's interesting to note that for this edition, G&D employed the same "silhouetted crook with a gun" jacket art that they had used for a couple of Raoul Whitfield novels in the early 1930s. .